THEATER REVIEW

THEATER REVIEW; A Triangle With Mother

By D. J. R. BRUCKNER

Published: April 1, 2000

What is most surprising in several of Candido Tirado's plays is that the leading character survives to the end after what the author likes to put them through. In ''Rey Sin Castillo'' (''King Without a Castle''), in production by the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater in Spanish on weekends and English on Wednesday through Friday, there are only three people and two are alive when the curtain falls, which seems almost a miracle.

Anyone familiar with earlier Candido works will recognize many of the afflictions of a young man, his wife and his passionately possessive mother in this play. Here there are incest, prostitution, child abandonment, confinement to mental hospitals, chess as a blood sport, a girl orphaned when her parents drown in a brutal fight, hallucinations sustained for 25 years, a fight to the death between a man and his shadow, a baby refusing to be born until it is wanted, and much more, including an onstage murder presented as a kind of justice. After two hours of this a viewer is likely to feel a familiar emotional dissipation as well as mental exhaustion from trying to follow a plot that eludes comprehension right to the end.

Since this company has attracted good directors (in this case Michael John Garces) for Mr. Tirado's work and impressive casts, it is difficult to resist wondering what would happen if they were allowed to participate in a kind of auction, deciding which character and plot elements from the gothic opulence of the playwright's imagination to present. His ability to create bizarre and disturbing scenes is considerable.

Even amid the chaos of ''King Without a Castle,'' that talent is often exploited to scary effect by Anilu Pardo as the mother, Francisco Lorite as her son and Selenis Leyva as the son's wife. Ms. Pardo has the most consistently developed role, and she makes the mother's manipulation of the young couple so menacing it is intolerable, but she can also arouse one's sympathy when it becomes clear she has been driven mad by a sorrow that she cannot acknowledge if she is to continue living.

Ms. Leyva has a tougher job, but by the end she makes the intelligence of her character overcome the neglect of her husband and the malice of her mother-in-law in a way that rescues her from being only a helpless victim. Such a rescue operation could not have succeeded with the character of the son; there are just too many versions of him in the script. Mr. Lorite plays each of them with great energy as they come along; as a vivid evocation of parts of an unfinished character, it is quite an act.